Multiple penguin species face population decline due to climate-driven prey shifts and habitat change. Individual welfare harms from food scarcity and extreme weather affect growing proportions of penguin populations.
Climate change creates direct welfare harms for individual penguins through chick starvation, thermal stress, nest site loss, and the energetic cost of foraging further for increasingly scarce prey. Chicks abandoned by parents unable to find sufficient prey starve slowly over days. Adult penguins making longer foraging trips to find fish experience nutritional stress and may fail to provision chicks adequately. Oil spills create acute welfare catastrophes requiring labor-intensive rehabilitation to clean and restore insulating feather structure. The scale of penguin welfare harms from climate change is enormous given the large colonies affected, making climate action one of the most significant penguin welfare interventions available at policy level.